Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Tonight seems like a good night to dip back into what I have started calling my "big bag of Victorian portraits". Obviously these archival gems are not kept in a big bag, but you hopefully get the general sense that these are a random selection of archival portraits. My goal is to provide an idea of how people of the Annapolis Royal area looked from the 1860s through the 1890s. How did they keep their hair both on their heads and facial? What sort of clothing did they wear? Most of all, why is the man in the top image hanging his hand in his pants?

Using portraits as the basis for some of these answers can be a bit misleading. The men in these pictures were wearing their best clothes. These would have been the same clothes worn to church on Sunday morning. If you were going to have your portrait taken you would always wear your best. After all, why would you want to be remembered in the manure stained shirt and trousers you used for the morning's chores? While they may not show what the average person was wearing while at work, these images do give you a sense of what you might see if you were to walk down St George Street on a Sunday morning in 1872. Hopefully the people with a hand in their pants would have been at a minimum.